


What’s love got to do with it

by bevsmrsh



Category: IT (2017)
Genre: AU where richie and bill switch places, Au where Richie is an artist, Georgie Tozier au, M/M, Obsessive thoughts, One-Shot, one-sided
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-04 17:43:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14598318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bevsmrsh/pseuds/bevsmrsh
Summary: Richie Tozier has a serious lack of words, so the only way he feels like he can express his emotions is through art and obsessive thoughts. When Eddie Kaspbrak comes into his life, the world is a bright place again and with his help Richie gets a scholarship to an art school in New York.Or: the one where Richie’s in love.





	What’s love got to do with it

**Author's Note:**

> This is an experimental piece, probably just gonna be a one-shot. Enjoy!

If you were to stare at a color long enough it starts to become boring to you. Throughout his life, yellow had probably been his favorite color. It was mornings spent listening to his mother play the piano and then it was afternoons spent in the rain with Georgie, curling into evenings of the yellow countertops and bright daisies painted below the top border of the kitchen walls. Of course eventually the piano playing had to stop and that was also when the yellow started fading into beige. The kitchen was made of mud, the piano was collecting dust, a room sat empty and he couldn’t bring himself to stop looking at the once-yellow-now-nothing raincoat that hung on the door every time he passed by. Richie had tried cleaning the room out once but his mother started crying and asking him to stop and suddenly his hands couldn’t move and the room was spinning.

He still had friends, of course, but none of them seemed to make the fullness of spring fade faster than Eddie Kaspbrak with his bright smiles and bright freckles and bright eyes. His hair was made of rolling black waves that caught fire in the sunlight and the flames kept him up at night. It gave him goosebumps and burned his skin when he stood too close. A series of nights where he laid on his bed staring at the ceiling thinking about the ball of sun named Eddie had begun to play out, and soon that caused him to turn to art. Richie had never been one for words, he couldn’t articulate his feelings very well, nor could he even begin a sentence about him that didn’t end three syllables in after he got frustrated with his vacant mind.

He drew him constantly. His use of color was the most vivid vocabulary he could conjure up and he could never find the right shade of brown for his eyes when he needed it so he would stay up for hours and hours searching through boxes of colored pencils for it. His parents had long since stopped caring about what time Richie got to bed so long as he wasn’t disturbing their own slumber, so they hardly noticed when the bags under his eyes started growing darker. The color yellow had become foreign to him for so long, he had to reacquaint himself with it. They were old friends, sure, but old friends stop being friends for a reason. They avoid one another and don’t pick up the phone if they know who’s calling. Richie always knew who was calling until red took over his sight to the point that he could no longer distinguish the difference between Do Not Disturb and Call Back Soon.

The twitching of hungry fingers and the flickering of memorized images across his eyes were what kept his head above the water when he went swimming. His mother stopped hanging his art work on the fridge when yellow was yanked away the first time so Richie decided to step up and do it for her, though the fridge could never be large enough for the endless pieces of paper he would ball up out of frustration when he got the tilt of his lip wrong. Furniture was ripped away from walls in his bedroom and suddenly the entire world was captured in swirling balls of color. He painted everything he could think of, a recreation of Starry Night where it was not so much about the stars as it was about the people stuck inside of them. Eyes bigger than pillows and his own personal missing persons board with hundreds of people looking out to him for help.

In the weeks after the clown and the sewers, his father asked him to paint the kitchen white and he started to but then he began changing colors, adding splashes of shapes never even thought of before. His father had yelled, “why can’t you focus when people are asking you to do things!” and Richie only stared absently in response. Eddie and the others came over all the time. The day that school started he was marched up to the vice principal next to the boy made of galaxies and obscure explosions too far to feel but real enough to see. He demanded that Richie was put into the same art class that he was in and the man complied because no one argues with a supernova that can shift the earth between his even if he is only just passing five feet tall.

Four years passed in exactly 3.25 minutes and suddenly a scholarship was being shoved into his pockets. Some place down in New York where boys who paint flowers and draw pretty boys who have rivers for eyes and sunshine for freckles are welcome and wanted. Where being distracted isn’t necessarily a bad thing so long as they aren’t afraid of getting messy. The summer before he left for college was the first time he kissed Eddie Kaspbrak and suddenly the red turned to blue because he had forgotten how warm a cool color can be. His fingers on his skin created elegant lines of aqua and every step he took was accented by a splash of navy.

His curly hair was green, not brown as he had previously thought and suddenly very pink cheeks had become tan because girls had started being nice and boys had suddenly become important. A river was not so much a river when you stood in it for a long time, it felt like a cold blanket; one that he wanted to wrap himself in forever despite how prosperous his future seemed.

Richie put Georgie’s raincoat back into his closet and closed the door to the room. He packed the rest of his clothes away into the car and in a matter of minutes turned to hours his little brother’s door was decorated in thousands of boats floating downstream in the current of Eddie Kaspbrak’s eyes and into the depths of the ocean hours away from where he stood. With paint on nearly every inch of visible skin, he said goodbye to his mother and father, and the he said goodbye to his friends. He did not kiss Eddie Kaspbrak goodbye because this was not goodbye and because he had finally stopped drawing him. He was to be held dear to his heart and kept for strictly paintings, as they were what he was able to display most often.

With his suitcase and boxes of art supplies sitting in the bed of his truck, Richie Tozier leaves the little town of Derry, Maine for New York. His hands shake and for the first time in a long time his mind is not occupied with a mantra but rather filled with the words of a song on the sometimes inconsistent radio station. He thought Billy Joel would lift his spirits a little more than he did, so he decided to change the station a few times. He settled on Tina Turner, humming the lyrics as he came to a stop outside of a more than familiar house and watched as more suitcases were flung into the bed of his trucks. The passenger side door was swung open and Eddie Kaspbrak climbed inside, the old leather of the seat cracking beneath him.

He pulled the door shut and clicked into his seatbelt, tossing a hand through his hair as he looked over at Richie, his smile contagious and wonderful. “New York better be as cool as it is in the movies.”


End file.
